Ollie, Rob, Adam, and Huw discuss the woolly world of game translation, from the golden age of romhacking to the rise and fall of Working Designs. We finish with dramatic readings of WildBill’s strangely right-wing scripts for FEDA: The Emblem of Justice and Super Shell Monsters Story.

It’s the start of MisanthroPlay Season 5(!!) and we attended the Sunless Skies launch event at Failbetter Games’ South London office. We talk a little bit about that experience, and a whole lot about the first 10 hours of Sunless Skies, an unconventional and fiercely literary RPG that understands the potential of steampunk without stumbling down the common pro-imperialist pitfalls.

MisanthroPlay returns from hiatus to have an extended discussion on their own experiences with gender dysphoria, body dysmorphia, and the general horror and malaise of existence, before exploring a trio of excellent games that explore these themes: Sundae Month’s Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy, and Anna Anthropy’s dys4ia.

Misspent Youth is a LGBTIQA+ podcast on video games, why we play, and who we are. In the pilot episode, host Robert Fenner (@misanthrobob) talks about his experiences as an awe-struck toddler Yu Suzuki's arcade oeuvre, before consuming (and being consumed by) Phantasy Star as an early push-back against Midwestern masculine ideals. Later, he discovers Shin Megami Tensei, before falling in love with ZZT and its community as a means of queer expression and acceptance.

Surprise! Cocoa Controller's Samer Farag joins Robert for an in-depth and spoiler-filled discussion of Doki Doki Literature Club, a romance visual novel about Japanese high school girls, poetry, and definitely nothing else. It's best that you play it before listening, and you definitely should, as it's both free and short.